March, 2009

Conficker exposed!

I have always said that people work best when working under a time line and that the best work gets done in the 11th hour.

Proving my theory correct just a 36 hours before Conficker’s malicious code is set to activate (April 1), the virus has finally been cracked.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/30/…

Read more about it.

CCA baby!

I just wrote my first citrix exam 1y0-259 Citrix Xenapp 5 for windows server 2003 administration and I got a 95%!

The one thing I will note here is that in comparison to microsoft cert exams I found this very easy. Unlike MS who trys to trick you where there is the “right answer” and the “microsoft answer”, I found the citrix exam straight forward and easy. Don’t get me wrong you still need to know the material but you don’t need to try and dicipher the “code of the exam” nor do you have multiple right answers which might be right, nor do they give you questions which 4 paragraphs of usually BS but you have to scrutinize carefully because one sentence of it contains the trick for the question.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 for Outlook cannot be installed on a computer where Microsoft Exchange Server versions prior to Exchange Server 2007 are installed

I got this error while trying to install the outlook plugin for Microsoft CRM on a terminal server. The terminal server was definitely not running Exchange.

To fix this you need to get rid of a key in the registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange

You can export it, do the install and import it back if you need but it needs to be gone for the install to work.

Win a free XBOX!

The wonderful and fabulous individuals who host my blog are having a great competition where the prize is one of three XBOX’s. Take a look at the contest details here:

 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.co…

Cisco buying Pure Digital

Here is a link to the article:

 http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/03/19…

During a global economic recession Cisco is acting in a very aggressive manner, buying up a company, investing in others, trying to enter new markets like Blade servers and Mail Exchangers. This could work out really well for them. History has shown that in the down times the cream can rise to the top and strong companies with the right people, products and ideas can really prosper and flourish and snatch up the market share that everyone else is loosing ….

Or they will completely and uttlerly fall on their butts. Time will tell.

Good luck Cisco

Blackberry - Missing seperate icon for secondary mail account

If you have a blackberry that has been activated on a BES server and then set up a BIS email account as well you will get a second mail icon on your blackberry that is just for your BIS account.

However if you ever need to wipe and reactivate the blackberry the second mail icon will not automatically reappear and all mail for both BES and BIS will flow into the one mail folder,

To get the second icon back just go into Email Setup on the blackberry. Log into your BIS account and select the option to “Resend Service Books”, this will resolve the issue.

VM Converter - FAILED: A general system error occurred: The file is too big for the filesystem

I recently got this error while trying to P2V a server. The reason? On default settings when setting up a VMFS volume (block size 1) the maximum size of a virtual disk is 256 GB’s.

Now what can you do to fix this? Well sad answer is you can reformat you VMFS volume with a different block size.

Block size Max Virtual Disk size
1 256 GB
2 512 GB
4 1024 GB
8 2048 GB

If that isn’t something you care to do then keep in mind by default VM Converter will take the maximum size of each volume on your physical server (c,d,e, etc) and lump them all into one physical disks. You can however go into the settings and create a virtual disk for each volume (something I recommend doing regardless). You can also adjust the size of the target virtual disk to eliminate free space, IE if your D drive is 325 GB but has 80 GB free then by default it will try to create a 325 GB virtual disk (and fail) but you can adjust the virtual disk size down to 245 GB.

Hope this helps

Switching VM’s over to a different Virtual Center breaks connection between BES and Exchange server

We had an issue with our BES server stop working properly. Some mail was getting to users but there were errors sending mail and we couldn’t activate any new users.

Here was the error when trying to activate.

{e} MAPIMailbox::MAPIMailbox(2) - OpenMsgStore (0×8004011d) failed

A reboot of the exchange server followed by a reboot of the BES server fixed the issues but we weren’t sure if this was a coincidence or caused by switching the VM’s over to a different Virtual Center server

Shortly after that we moved over a different set of Exchange server and BES servers and the exact same issue occurred.

Be aware!

Blackberry comes up with Enterprise Activation error on startup

This Blackberry was activated on the BES and worked fine but every time the blackberry booted it came up with an activation error.

I wiped the blackberry and purged/re-added the user to the BES but it would not re-activate. I then purged the user and used the blackberry handheld cleanup utility on the BES server and that fixed the issue.

ASA 5520 not Nat’ing traffic

A colleague of mine and I were setting up and configuring an ASA 5520. We ran through the basic setup wizard and set up the preliminary NAT and access rules and found we could get out to the Internet. The ASA itself could access Internet resources but we on the inside connection could not. So of course we double checked out NAT rules and ACL and everything looked fine. So we figured it was a bug and did a factory default reset and still had the same issue. After the second factory-default reset we were ready to chalk it up to hardware issues when we decided to do one more factory-default reset and that fixed the problem. I am unsure what change on the third reset that didn’t on the first two but since then the device has been working fine.